Thursday Triple: Pre-Blockbuster Nicolas Cage

Every Thursday, a triple feature rental suggestion for your bulky netflix queues (you are using Netflix right? Blockbuster is raising their prices and Netflix deserves your pennies more anyway).

One of my goals for the new year is to call a truce with directors or actors I have grown to dislike or outright loathe over the past several years. I'm feeling the need to come at movie reviewing with less biased eyes next year. I figure after almost a decade of movie fanatcism, I need to be born again cinematically. In the interest of mending torn viewer/star relationships I have opted out of seeing either of Hilary Swank's presumably hideous 2007 offerings (The Reaping and P.S. I Love You). I don't need any fuel for my anti-Swank fire. Trying to let it die... Along the same lines I let Bee Movie buzz on by so as to store up the good feelings I've started to have for Renée Zellweger's non-ubiquity. I'm hoping to find something in her work to enjoy (like I used to) when Leatherheads opens next year. But one actor for whom the hate will be tough to exorcize is Nicolas Cage. Inexplicably America loves to watch him, bad rugs and all, in movies. He's currently sitting pretty atop the box office charts for National Treasure: Book of Secrets but after a recent home viewing of his earlier wannabe blockbuster Next (a flop, thank god) I am reminded again how absolutely talentless he seems. There are moments in Next where I thought he was doing a parody of "Joey Tribiano"'s famously bad (but funny) one-note acting on Friends. In one particularly hilarious repeated bit whenever he's "seeing" the future he furrows his brow suddenly but it reads more like constipation or gas passing then psychic powers. Oy.

So for sake of good feelings, here's three rental suggestions if you're feeling as bewildered as I am about Nicolas Cage's continued stardom and box office pull. He once had talent, right? The answer is actually yes.

PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED (1986)
There were people at the time that thought he ruined this otherwise charming movie directed by his uncle Francis Ford Coppola. It is a rather odd spin on the stock role of lovestruck teen. He can't quite figure his girlfriend out (Peggy Sue is rather confusing, being from the future and therefore wiser than her years. She's also Kathleen Turner and therefore totally understandably disarming too) and there is quite a bit of "performance" in it rather than naturalism but I think it works for the sometimes fanciful and engaging movie. Incidentally this is Kathleen Turner's only Oscar nominated role. And that just ain't right my friends.

MOONSTRUCK (1987)
Speaking of performing. How great was Cher in Moonstruck? If your memory is fuzzy, give it another go. It's easy to see why she won the Oscar, even if you still think that Glenn Close deserved one for cooking up those bunny rabbits in Fatal Attraction. This is the only time in Nicolas Cage's career that he convincingly played a sex object. Cher falls for him against her better judgment which is totally a plus for audiences who didn't want to 'snap out of it.' Cage's presence really worked in this movie because the point of their romance was that even while she was turned on by him she was also vaguely repulsed. In other words: he was perfectly cast.

LEAVING LAS VEGAS (1995)
While not my pick for Best Actor of 1995 (that'd be Sean Penn in Dead Man Walking) this is far and away the actors best work. It's so nice when actors win Oscars for great work rather than as an apology for not winning Oscars for great work. You know how that goes. Cage was totally at the top of his game here as an alcoholic aiming for suicide by drinking. It helps that his chemistry with Elisabeth Shue (his prostitute lover) was off the charts. Neither have ever been as moving before or since. I might go out and rent this again myself right now.

I could have just as easily said BIRDY (1984) or RAISING ARIZONA (1987) both of which also prove the point. He used to be well worth watching. [sigh]